Title image for a documentary film called 'Saving Throws' tabletop roleplaying games behind bars.

For decades, incarcerated people have secretly kept tabletop role-playing games (TTRPG) alive inside American correctional institutions, forced to improvise around restrictions on the games and materials they need to play. Through collaborative storytelling, they build trust, strengthen community, solve problems, and learn to navigate conflict, often risking punishment simply to keep playing.

Saving Throws brings their experiences together with perspectives from correctional professionals, mental health experts, researchers, and the TTRPG community to understand what is happening around these tables and why it matters. Through interviews, animation, and stories born from play, the film examines what these games may offer in a system where rehabilitation requires more than confinement.

As TTRPGs have grown into a global cultural phenomenon, their persistence behind prison walls exposes a striking contradiction between the goals of rehabilitation and the rules that can stand in its way. Saving Throws reveals how collaborative storytelling can help incarcerated people practice the very skills the criminal justice system asks them to develop before returning home.

Why We Roll

A detailed miniature model of a landscape with water, structures, and pathways showcased under a camera viewfinder.
Booklets inside a brown cardboard box with a black and white owl logo and text about Pittsburgh Prison Book Project.
Bulletin board with mailing restrictions notices and various papers, including Xeroxed lists, handwritten notes, and a QR code, in a community center or office.

  • "At the table, incarcerated participants are not simply told how to communicate. They practice it. They're not lectured about empathy. They experience the world through someone else's eyes."

    —Alicia Figliuolo, Director of Education and Training, Geek Therapeutics

  • "Role playing games absolutely have the ability to save lives and I don't say that lightly."

    —Dan Ayoub, Head of Dungeons & Dragons Franchise, Wizards of the Coast

  • "Everyone has their own rules, their own policies, and they can be arbitrarily enforced by whoever is working in the mail room that day."

    —Jodi Lincoln, Pittsburgh Prison Book Project

  • "in the prison system, you're there, you're trapped in this box in this cell and you need imagination."

    —Stefan Pokorny, World-builder and Co-Founder of Dwarven Forge